I was able to fix this issue for anyone that may see this thread in the future.
I am using the device initialization to create an MCU_init() which happens to initialize the vector table and interrupt service routines. by editing the vector table and declaring the interrupt handler in MCU_init.c, I was able to fix the problem. What was happening before was the MCU_init.c had just declared all ISRs as UNASSIGNED_ISR, which just made the interrupt execute meaningless code somewhere in memory.